Meaning and Purpose Helps Boost the Body’s Immune System

Studies have shown that a person’s state of mind can have a profound influence on the body’s immune system and therefore one’s physical health. Research suggests that negative mental states such as stress and loneliness can be detrimental to health, while happiness, purpose, and fulfillment can foster healing and good health.

Although it has proven difficult to determine exactly how mood influences the complex physiology of the nervous and immune systems, scientists in the field of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) are looking to find out exactly what the health benefits of a healthy mental state are.

In 1964 magazine editor Norman Cousins was diagnosed with a life-threatening autoimmune disease known as ankylosing spondylitis. He was given a 1 in 500 chance of recovery. Cousins created his own program of happiness therapy, which included regular doses of Marx Brothers films. After a dramatic recovery, Cousins founded the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the University of California, Los Angeles, dedicated to investigating how psychology interplays with good health.

Steve Cole, a professor at the Cousins Center, is currently at the forefront of this research. Along with colleagues, Cole has published several studies that demonstrate how negative mental states like feelings of isolation, unhappiness, and stress weaken the body’s ability to fight disease by impacting immune response. Cole contends that the way people see the world can influence their risk for developing chronic illnesses like diabetes and heart disease and enable—or disable—the progression of illnesses like HIV and cancer. 

“My job,” says Cole, “is to be a hardcore tracker. How do these mental states get out into the rest of the body?” To combat criticism from some in the scientific community that PNI lacks rigor, Cole’s tool of choice is genome-wide transcriptional analysis—that is, looking at broad programs of gene expression in cells. 

Scientific studies on the subject have advanced since the 1980s, when it was revealed that the brain is directly wired to the immune system. A British study, and others, suggests that chronic work stress increases the risk of coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Another study showed that during stressful exam periods, medical students had lower activity from virus-fighting immune cells and were more prone to the Epstein-Barr virus. 

Although skeptics remain, an increasing number of researchers and scientists accept there is a connection between mental and physical health. Medical schools worldwide now have departments of mind-body medicine. The task now is for the scientific community to determine exactly how signals from the brain feed into physical health.